Mick Hartley

Here we go again:

The Environment Agency has stripped the words mother and father from its staff policies in an attempt to ensure they are “non-gendered”.

Bosses at the quango showed off their inclusive credentials when applying for a scheme for top UK employers run by the LGBT lobby group Stonewall.

In the application, seen by The Times, it said it had swapped mother and father with “primary carer” in its maternity, paternity and shared parental leave policies, making them gender-neutral.

For access to its buildings, it said that workers could request “more than one passcard … in order to be able to express different identities on different days”.

The Environment Agency also confirmed that it questioned potential suppliers and contractors about their policies on “homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying and harassment”.

All of its directors had completed “unconscious bias training” and attended refreshers on a regular basis, the application stated.

The Environment Agency applied for the Stonewall annual top 100 employers list in 2020 and 2022, a freedom of information request revealed.

The lobby group’s list enables employers across the public and private sector to show how progressive and inclusive their workplace is.

Our rivers and lakes are full of sewage pumped in by the greedy and useless water companies, but never mind: as long as they have sound policies on “homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying and harassment” we can rest assured the Environment Agency will be happy.

Howard Jacobson lectured at Sydney University back in the Sixties, and loved it. 

I felt accepted. I didn’t tell my mother this in case she worried I’d never return, but to friends I wrote: “Time will tell, but this could be one of the greatest places on earth to be a Jew.”

But times, and Australia, have changed. After October 7th there were chants of "Gas the Jews" by the Sydney Opera House.

So what happened? I have my own explanation. The left happened. Australia is a political country, by which I mean it wears its party allegiances openly. As a student at an English university, I hadn’t known or cared about my fellow-students’ politics. As a teacher at an Australian university, I knew how my students’ parents voted. Such overtness should not have surprised me, given how the country was settled. Hatred of the cruelties and condescension of colonialism still simmered close to the surface. So of course Jews, who had been pushed around and talked down to for centuries, felt at home here. We had a special understanding, too, of what Australians called the “cultural cringe”, that strange inferiority complex that was part envy of what you didn’t have, part rage that you didn’t have it, and part belief that what you did have was something better. We were in it together, Australians and Jews. We were equally thin-skinned, tried equally hard not to be, and shared edgy jokes. But then came the Six Day War.

I left Australia just as the conflict broke out. Every Australian I knew had been on the side of “brave little Israel”. By the time I got back to England, Israel had made the lethal mistake of winning. I heard nothing from my Australian left-wing friends. A few years later, I went back and discovered why. I had no left-wing friends. On the orders of the Soviet Union they had given up on Israel and, since I hadn’t, they had no choice but to give up on me. Those I had laughed with over a beer had stopped laughing and those I had talked literature to had stopped talking about literature. Post-colonialism, they called it now.

Before the Six Day War, Jews had been paradigmatic victims of colonialism. After the Six Day War, they were its paradigmatic proponents. Australia ceased to be the greatest place to be a Jew….

I saw the headline – Former State Department Advisor Hazem Alghabra Clashes with BBC TV Host Over U.S. Suspending UNRWA Funding – and wondered who was was for suspending aid to UNRWA and who was against. Well, of course…

Hazem Alghabra, former State Department advisor, speaking from Washington D.C., clashed with BBC TV host, Mohamed Abdul Hamid, over American suspension of UNRWA funding on a January 30, 2024 show on BBC Arabic (U.K.). He said that 12 UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7 attacks against Israel and that UNRWA centers and schools are used to store weapons and rockets, some of which were even launched at Israel from within them. Alghabra continued to say that Hamas uses UNRWA to provide food, schooling, and salaries to the people of Gaza so it can focus on digging tunnels and manufacture weapons. He said that Hamas has gone so far as to say that it is not responsible to provide the basic needs of the people of Gaza because it is under occupation (see MEMRITV clip no 10585). Abdul Hamid responded that Hamas’s statement is correct and that the UN and UNRWA are not doing any favors to the people of Gaza by providing aid to them, it is their duty to do so under international law. Alghabra said that Hamas cannot be part of Gaza’s future and that the people of Gaza must spew them out. To this Abudl Hamid replied that it is unfair that the civilians in Gaza are used to drive Hamas out of their leadership role in Gaza. Alghabra said that no country is obligated to support UNRWA, and they can choose to stop this support so UNRWA can reform itself and the Palestinians can make better decisions.

After UNRWA, maybe BBC Arabic should be the next to get defunded.

From October:

The BBC has launched an urgent investigation into some of its journalists working for its Arabic service after they appeared to back Hamas and called the attacks on Israel 'a morning of hope'.

Just like the old homophobia – but this time it's "progressive":

Glasgow Women's Library has chosen to display a delightful penis-centred work (read the whole thread) designed to shame and coerce lesbians out of same-sex orientation. If anyone can think of a more appropriate name for the Glasgow Women's Library, do let me know. https://t.co/xS6uuWfrFw

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 2, 2024

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The whole thing is obsessed with insinuating penises into lesbianism. This page says that 'to say that because someone has a particular body or body part they can't be a woman or a lesbian is transphobic'. pic.twitter.com/1u6iYndcQZ

— Scottish Lesbians (@ScotLesbians) February 1, 2024

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Well, she seems nice. From the Telegraph:

A senior BBC employee branded Jewish people “Nazis” and white people “parasites” in a string of social media posts.

The BBC has been informed of statements made online by Dawn Queva, who is a scheduling coordinator at BBC Three, according to her online profile.

Posts made on her Facebook page include calling Jewish people “Nazi apartheid parasites” that funded a “holohoax”.

Her posts repeatedly attack white people, calling them a “virus” and “mutant invader species”.

Ms Queva, whose location is listed as London on her Linkedin profile, also brands the UK “bigoted” and “genocidal” and claims white Europeans are “melanin-recessive parasites”….

Ms Queva’s post made numerous references to the supposed origins of the Jewish people, claiming that they are not truly Jewish, but a “synagogue of Satan cabal calling themselves “JeWISH”.

One post claims that the Rothschild family “funded their own holohoax”, and another that Israel is attempting to “forcibly permanently sterilise black women without their knowledge or consent”.

Several of Ms Queva’s many posts refer to Britain as the “UKKK”, in an apparent reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

Other posts state that white people have disturbed the natural order of the planet, and that they are a “barbaric bloodthirsty rapacious murderous genocidal thieving parasitical deviant breed”.

More Putin desperation, from the Telegraph:

An awkward Vladimir Putin joined schoolchildren in singing the national anthem in Moscow on Thursday.

The Russian president and the crowd repeatedly chanted “Russia” before breaking into song at a youth event.

Keir Starmer's position on conversion therapy depends very much on which way the wind's blowing, and who he's talking to. After a brief flirtation with a gender-critical position after that seemed to gaining the upper hand with the public, he now seems back on track with his LGBT chums. Well, the Ts anyway. Joan Smith at UnHerd:

How will a Labour government handle the conflict between women’s rights and the demands of trans activists? Optimists believe that the party has rowed back from an extreme position on gender ideology, but gender-critical women’s organisations and even some of his own MPs struggle to get a meeting with Sir Keir Starmer.

Not so trans activists, for whom Starmer apparently has all the time in the world. This week he welcomed members of the lobby group LGBT+ Labour to a reception at Westminster and offered them everything the most dedicated trans activist could want, short of self-ID. Starmer was accompanied by a raft of frontbenchers including his deputy, Angela Rayner, and the Shadow Women and Equalities Minister, Anneliese Dodds.

“Together we’ll ban conversion therapy, strengthen hate crime laws and tackle health inequalities,” Dodds posted excitedly on X.

The big question, of course, is what do they mean by conversion therapy. Does that include "gender identity"? It appears that it does.

Banning “trans conversion therapy” has become an article of faith for leading Labour figures, even though they are strangely reluctant to tell us what exactly it is and how often it is happening. They have been warned repeatedly that a ban risks criminalising parents and counsellors who take a cautious approach to children expressing unhappiness with their sex, but they don’t listen.

The assumption behind all this talk – that there are trans children just as there are gay children – is a disastrous misunderstanding, fostered by groups like Stonewall. Children who claim to be trans, to have a gender identity different from their "gender assigned at birth", need to be talked with, allowed time to grow through puberty without irreversible medical intervention. But that's precisely what the trans activists are calling "conversion therapy".

It must be galling for Labour MPs such as Rosie Duffield, who has been relentlessly targeted by LGBT+ Labour, to see the party’s leading figures palling up to its members. Starmer has not spoken to Duffield for more than two years, leaving her to cope unsupported with endless smears and demands that she should lose the Labour whip. He is evidently more comfortable with the widely-ridiculed MP for Jarrow, Kate Osborne, who was at the reception despite having boasted on X about her delusion that some women have a penis.

It speaks volumes about the state of Labour that these are the people — reality-deniers and lobby groups who try to silence gender-critical MPs — that leading figures want to impress. It’s not unheard of for politicians to tailor their policies to their audience, but the pattern is clear. Each apparent lurch towards reality by Labour frontbenchers is followed by a capitulation to trans activism.

That’s bad enough, but the general election is going to bring about an influx of Labour MPs who are signed up to all the nonsense about pronouns and gender identity. Labour’s woman problem hasn’t gone away, and the party’s leading figures don’t even bother to hide it.

It's not a happy prospect.

We thought we'd waved goodbye to all the horrors of the early/mid 20th century, but here we go again. Virulent antisemitism's on the rise, and in Russia under Putin they seem to be arriving at some kind of ultra-nationalist clerical fascism, with perhaps the nearest historical equivalent being Romania's Iron Guard of the Thirties. Unfortunately, unlike Romania, Russia has nuclear weapons and is waging a war of extermination against Ukraine.

From the Times:

The Russian soldier had the pro-war Z symbol on his uniform and a halo around his head. Behind him angels soared through the heavens. Nearby, another soldier cradled an automatic weapon in front of an image of Jesus. A caption read: “Christ defeated hell and so will Russia.”

The images, startling even for wartime, are among propaganda posters put on display in central Moscow to bolster religious support for the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Another poster reads: “If God is for us, who is against us?”

Patriarch Kirill, the head of the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, has described the war as a sacred battle against “forces of evil” that are trying to destroy Russia. He has also said that only Moscow can prevent the rise of the “antichrist” and that Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine will have all their sins forgiven.

Last year, state media reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared at a hospital in Moscow where Kirill visited injured troops.

Kirill, 77, who has called President Putin’s long rule a “miracle of God”, has sought to clamp down on church dissent over the invasion.

Alexey Uminsky, a prominent liberal priest, refused to read a pro-war prayer and has been banned from serving in a church in Moscow where he had preached for 30 years. A church court also recommended his expulsion from the priesthood.

At least there's some clerical opposition, but it's clearly powerless.

Dozens of other priests who have prayed for peace instead of victory have been punished. The concept of peace is increasingly alien for the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose court ruled last year that pacifism was heresy.

The whole country is rotting, from the head down.

On Tuesday I featured a piece by UN Watch's Hillel Neuer on UNRWA. He was, he said, off to "present our findings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs". Well, here he is:

The way the non-binary faithful obsess about intersexes, and about individuals who can’t produce gametes, amounts to a pathetic clutching at straws while they drown in postmodern effluent. Yes, some fish change from sperm-producing male to egg-producing female (or vice versa).…

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 1, 2024

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Full text:

The way the non-binary faithful obsess about intersexes, and about individuals who can’t produce gametes, amounts to a pathetic clutching at straws while they drown in postmodern effluent. Yes, some fish change from sperm-producing male to egg-producing female (or vice versa). That very statement relies on the gametic definition of male & female. Ditto hermaphroditic worms & snails who can produce both male & female gametes.

In any case, the existence of intersexes is irrelevant to transexualist claims, since trans people don’t claim to be intersexes. Also, as if it matters, humans are not worms, snails, or fish.

The rare tetra-amelia syndrome (babies born without limbs) does not negate the statement that Homo sapiens is a bipedal species. The rare four-winged bithorax mutation does not negate the statement that Drosophila is a Dipteran (two winged) fly. Similarly, the occasional individual who can’t produce gametes doesn’t negate the generalisation that mammals come in only two sexes, male and female, defined by games size.

Sex is binary as a matter of biological fact. "Gender" is a different matter and I leave that to others to define.